The shortcomings of America’s political leaders do not stop at our borders. The conduct of foreign policy is equally shortsighted and more undemocratic.
When the president beats the drums of war, the dictatorial side of American politics begins to rear its ugly head. Forget democratic processes, congressional and judicial restraints, media challenge, and the facts. All of that goes out the door. It’s the president, stupid—plus the clique that surrounds him and the vested interests that reflexively support him. Dissenting Americans may hold rallies in the streets, but their voice is drowned out by the bully pulpit.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the resulting quagmire, is Bush’s most egregious foreign policy folly, but reflects a broader dynamic. Listen to retired General Wesley Clark’s stinging indictment of the administration: “President Bush plays politics with national security. Cowboy talk. The administration is a threat to domestic liberty.”
But Clark was a Democratic candidate for president. So let’s listen to Michael Kinsley, the respected columnist who has written for Time and the Washington Post, and is now editorial and opinion editor for the Los Angeles Times. In March 2003, Kinsley wrote that “in terms of the power he now claims, George W. Bush is now the closest thing in a long time to dictator of the world.” An unelected dictator at that.
Bush a dictator? You’d never know it from the words he uses most often—“freedom,” “liberty,” “our way of life.” You’d never know it from public opinion polls, which respond favorably to an unchallenged jingoism. The politics of fear sells. Cold war politics sold. The war on terrorism sells. But it’s a very expensive sale for the American people. Even with the Soviet Union long gone, America’s military budget amounts to half the operating federal budget. While vast resources and specialized skills are sucked into developing and producing redundant and exotic weapons of mass destruction, America’s economy suffers and its infrastructure crumbles.
As the majority of workers fall behind, Bush has appointed himself ruler of Baghdad and, with the complicity of a fawning Congress, is draining billions of dollars away from rebuilding America’s public works—schools, clinics, transit systems, and the rest of our crumbling infrastructure.
How does Bush sell America on this diversion of funds and focus? With the politics of fear. He, John Ashcroft, and company openly tout the state of permanent war.
Are there no limits to their hubris? The same Bush regime that applies rigid cost-benefit analysis to deny overdue government health and safety standards for American consumers, workers, and the environment sends astronomical budgets to Congress for the war on stateless terrorism. Bush’s own Office of Management and Budget throws its hands up and observes that the usual controls and restraints are nowhere in sight. To appropriate runaway spending in the name of homeland security, the powers-that-be need only scream one word: Terrorism!
If you ask the Bushies how much this effort will cost, they recite a convenient mantra: “whatever it takes to protect the American people.” In fact, trillions of dollars annually would not suffice to fully secure our ports, endless border crossings by trucks and other vehicles, the rail system, petrochemical and nuclear plants, drinking water systems, shipments of toxic gases, dams, airports and airplanes, and so forth. So “whatever it takes” is actually a prescription for unlimited spending.
Much of the war on terrorism involves domestic guards and snoops. The word “terrorism,” endlessly repeated by the president and his associates, takes on an Orwellian quality as a mind-closer, a silencer, an invitation to Big Brother and Bigger Government to run roughshod over a free people who in the past fought real wars without losing their liberties or composure.
A country with numerous and highly complex vulnerable targets cannot be fully secured against determined, suicidal, well-financed and equipped attackers. That obviously doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take prudent measures to reduce risks, but our allocation of funds must be made realistically, rather than just throwing money at the problem. Domestic security specialists know that we are spending unwisely, but they are not about to blow the whistle. As one expert told me, these specialists do not speak out because they wish to get on the gravy train, gathering lucrative contracts.
Then there’s the great unmentionable. If you listen to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and crew, well-financed suicidal al Qaeda cells are all over the country. If so, why haven’t any of them struck since September 11? No politician dares to raise this issue, though it’s on the minds of many puzzled Americans. As General Douglas McArthur advised in 1957, and General Wesley Clark much more recently, it is legitimate to ask whether our government has exaggerated these risks facing us, especially when such exaggeration serves political purposes—stifling dissent, sending government largesse to corporate friends, and deflecting attention from pressing domestic needs.
George Bush willingly moves us toward a garrison state, an American Sparta, through the politics of fear. We’re experiencing a wave of militarism resulting in invasive domestic intelligence gathering and disinvestment in civilian economies. The tone of the president becomes increasingly imperial and even un-American. As he once told his National Security Council, “I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the President…I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”
The president has implied that he occupies his current role by virtue of divine providence. His messianic complex makes him as closed-minded as any president in history. Not only is he immune from self-doubt, but he fails to listen to the citizenry prior to making momentous decisions. In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, Bush didn’t meet with a single citizens’ group opposed to the war. In the weeks leading up to the war, thirteen organizations—including clergy, veterans, former intelligence officials, labor, business, students—representing millions of Americans wrote Bush to request a meeting. He declined to meet with a single delegation of these patriotic Americans and didn’t even answer their letters.
Bush’s authoritarian tendencies preceded the march to Baghdad. First he demanded an unconstitutional grant of authority from Congress in the form of an open-ended war resolution. Our King George doesn’t lose sleep over constitutional nuance, especially when members of Congress willingly yield their authority to make war to an eager president.
Next, Bush incessantly focused the public on the evils of Saddam Hussein (a U.S. ally from 1979–1990), specifically how his weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Queda posed a mortal threat to America. The administration’s voice was so loud and authoritative, and the media so compliant, that all other voices—of challenge, correction, and dissent—were drowned out.
And so Bush plunged the nation into war based on fabrications and deceptions, notwithstanding notes of caution and disagreement from inside the Pentagon, the CIA, and the State Department. This was a war launched by chicken hawks, counter to the best judgment of battle-tested army officers inside and outside the government.
In retrospect, it seems clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction except those possessed by the invading countries. It also seems clear that Saddam Hussein was a tottering dictator “supported” by a dilapidated army unwilling to fight for him and surrounded by far more powerful hostile nations (Israel, Iran, and Turkey). The notion that this man posed a mortal threat to the strongest nation in the world fails the giggles test.
Bush’s war arguably meets the threshold for invoking impeachment proceedings under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution. But not a chance with today’s compliant, complicit Congress. Not a chance in an environment that considers dissent unpatriotic. An environment in which the media neglects its role as watchdog.
Some brave Americans did speak out against the war, or at least expressed grave reservations. How much coverage did they receive on television or in other mass media? This will go down as a disgraceful chapter in the history of journalism. The media were mostly cheerleaders—uncritical of the leader, dismissive of dissenters, indifferent to their obligation to search for truth and hold officialdom’s feet to the fire, and grateful to the spike in ratings occasioned by the build-up and eventual war. MSNBC, or, in reality, owner General Electric, fired Phil Donahue at least in part for his willingness to criticize the White House war effort.
In the end, the media felt betrayed. David Kay, Bush’s chief arms inspector in Iraq, returned in February 2004 after 1,500 inspectors scoured the country, and summed up his findings in a sentence: “We were wrong” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Only then did the media respond with fury at having been duped. Too little, too late. A democratic society needs media to do their job prospectively, not after an unnecessary and pre-emptive war.
What about the leaders of the legal profession, the national and state bar associations, people presumably devoted to the rule of law? You might expect them to speak out. Don’t be silly! Apart from select criticisms of enforcement of the Patriot Act, the organized bar has neglected its role as sentinels for our democratic processes. Few lawyers, law school deans, and state attorney generals have met their professional obligations. (There were a few shining exceptions, such as law professors David Cole and Philip Heyman.)
If there was precious little organized resistance to the Bush war from outside government, the situation was even worse within government. The system of checks and balances requires three vigilant branches, but Congress has disgraced itself from virtually the beginning of the Bush administration, assisting an extraordinary shift of power to the executive branch.
In October 2001, a panicked Congress passed the Patriot Act, giving the Bush administration unprecedented powers over individuals suspected (and in some cases not even suspected) of crimes. Two years later, Congress gave the president a virtual blank check to wage a costly war.
In these respects, and others, the war on terrorism has important parallels to the Cold War. Domestically, the latter was characterized by relentless focus on a bipolar world largely dictated by the iron triangle of giant defense companies, Congress, and the military leadership, mutually reinforced with campaign contributions, lucrative contracts, new weaponry, and bureaucratic positions.
A foreign policy responsive to the iron triangle produced some perverse results. The United States overthrew any number of governments viewed as too congenial to similiar reforms that our own ancestors fought for—land reform, workers rights, and neutrality toward foreign countries. We replaced such governments with brutal puppet regimes. We also used our armed forces to protect the interests of the oil, timber, mining, and agribusiness industries.
Actually, such policies long proceeded the Cold War. No one articulated it more clearly or candidly than Marine General Smedley Butler, whose provocative eyewitness accounts rarely made their way into our history books:
I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for Capitalism.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.
I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American Sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
“War is a racket,” Butler wrote, noting that it tends to enrich a select few. Not the ones on the front lines. “How many of the war millionaires shouldered a rifle?” he asked rhetorically. “How many of them dug a trench?”
Butler devoted a chapter of his long-ignored book, War Is a Racket, to naming corporate profiteers. He also recounted the propaganda used to shame young men into joining the armed forces, noting that war propagandists stopped at nothing: “even God was brought into it.” The net result? “Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability.”
Does this all sound familiar? The September 11 attack gave rise to a corporate profiteering spree, including a demand for subsidies, bailouts, waivers from regulators, tort immunity, and other evasions of responsibility. Before the bodies were even recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center, the Wall Street Journal was editorializing that its corporate patrons should seize the moment.
Foreign policy amounts to more than national defense, and national defense amounts to more than a mega-business opportunity for weapons and other contractors. All too often, corporate sales priorities have driven defense priorities, leading to militarization of foreign policy.
Consider the 1990’s “peace and prosperity” decade, possibly the greatest blown opportunity of the twentieth century. In 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed in a bloodless implosion. Suddenly we faced the prospect of an enormous “peace dividend,” an opportunity for massive savings or newly directed expenditures since the main reason for our exorbitant military budget had disappeared.
Not so fast, said the military-industrial complex, there must be another major enemy out there—maybe Communist China, or a resurgent Russia, or some emerging nation developing nuclear weapons. We allegedly needed to prepare for the unknown, hence went full-speed ahead with billions for missile defense technology. In the battle for budget allocations, what chance did the “repair America” brigades have against the military-industrial complex? More B-2 bombers or repaired schools? F-22s or expansion of modern health clinics? More nuclear submarines or upgraded drinking water systems? We know who won those battles. And after 9/11, it was no contest.
As the perceived threat shifted from the Soviet Union to stateless terrorism, the weapons systems in the pipeline from the Cold War days moved toward procurement. On top of that is the chemical, biological, surveillance, detection, intelligence budgets to deal with the al Qaeda menace. Everything is added, almost nothing displaced.
We are constantly told by politicians and the anti-terrorist industry that 9/11 “changed everything.” This sentiment suggests the lack of proportionality of our new permanent war. It’s also a sentiment that must make Osama bin Laden ecstatic. Bin Laden wanted to strike fear in America. He did so, and then watched as the first response to this fear was a crackdown on anyone with a Muslim or Arab name or visage. Thousands were detained or arrested or jailed on the flimsiest of suspicions, opening the Bush administration up to the charge of hypocrisy when we challenge Islamic nations about due process violations. All of this created more contempt for America among young people throughout the Middle East, no doubt helping the recruiting efforts of our enemies.
Bin Laden must have delighted in attempting to push America toward becoming a police state and sowing discord among us. He must have been thrilled by red and orange alerts, inconvenience at airports, all kinds of excessive expenditures damaging our economy. And bin Laden must have taken perverse delight in press reports that Bush believes he was put on this earth by God to win the war on terrorism. Bin Laden met his counterpart when it comes to a messianic impulse. If he wished to inspire a clash of civilizations, he apparently found a willing collaborator in Bush.
As all this suggests, America’s response to 9/11 was not only disproportionate but also counterproductive. Recently on ABC’s Night-line, a Washington think tank fellow said something sensible: “When you are fighting terrorism, you want to do it in a way that does not produce more of it.” Are we doing that?
Terrorism takes many forms, as in the Sudan, as in the Rwanda rampage that claimed 800,000 lives, the state terrorism of dictators, the added terrorism of hunger, disease, sex slavery, and man-made environmental disasters. With no major state enemy left, what can we do to prevent and diminish these various forms of terrorism, as well as deter more suicidal attacks from fundamentalists? Perhaps we need to redefine national security, redirect our mission, reconsider our relations with other countries.
Starting with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whether cause or pretext, this conflict gives rise to widespread animosity against the United States, the chief ally and supplier of economic and military aid to Israel. The outlines of a peaceful resolution are known and supported by a majority of Israelis and Palestinians—a two-state solution creating a viable, independent Palestinian nation with its capital in East Jerusalem and in charge of its own air, water, land, and boundaries. Compensation of Palestinians for lost property, and the return of some refugees to Israel to rejoin their relatives are issues warranting negotiation.
To make peace a reality, the United States must connect with the peace movement in Israel. The “refuseniks”—veteran Israeli officers and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces (over 1,300 of them)—have rejected duty in the Occupied Territories. Their declaration states: “We shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people.” (For their entire statement, see www.seruv.org.il.) PEACE NOW has been pushing the Israeli government to seek peace through negotiations and mutual compromise. In a recent call-to-action, PEACE NOW said, “A small minority of settlers has taken over the government and country. The disengagement plan has failed—and the government of Sharon and Lapid are not offering any alternative options for an end to the conflict!” Within the Knesset, leaders of the Meretz Party have been very critical of Sharon’s policies. MK Yossi Sarid (a leader of the Meretz Party), referring to Sharon said, “You don’t have the right to destroy Menachem Begin’s life work, and his establishment of peace with Egypt, and you don’t have the right to destroy the labors of Yitzhak Rabin’s life, and his forging of peace with Jordan.” Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun, is an outspoken critic of occupations by both Israel and the United States. Rabbi Lerner said, “The Bush/Sharon axis of occupation has little chance of bringing lasting peace, but they may bring temporary electoral advantages, even as they erode the moral authority of two countries which could have been beacons of hope and instead have become symbols of insensitivity and arrogance.”
Unfortunately, our government has supported the Sharon government, which remains dominated by those who believe that Israel can achieve a military solution to the conflict. America cannot effectively mediate peace unless it is seen as pro-Palestinian as well as pro-Israeli. We can start by recognizing that there is far greater freedom inside Israel than in America to discuss candidly the conditions of the conflict.
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times has observed, interviewed, and thought about how to break the cycle of violence in this conflict between a massively more powerful Israel and its Palestinian adversaries, both of whom he has criticized.
On February 5, 2004, his column evidenced his frustration with the governments of Israel and the United States:
Mr. Sharon has the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat under house arrest in his office in Ramallah, and he’s had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office. Mr. Sharon has Mr. Arafat surrounded by tanks, and Mr. Bush surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who’s ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates, and by political handlers telling the president not to put any pressure on Israel in an election year—all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing.
A second task for a redirected national security strategy involves arms control—reduction or elimination of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. This requires choosing between encouraging the lucrative private export of arms (the current position) or seeking the systematic diminution of such lethal trafficking.
There’s been much good work in this area, both by the Arms Control unit of the Defense Department and by various private prominent scientists and disarmament experts. There have also been setbacks, including the Bush administration’s rejection of the ABM Treaty and the Clinton administration’s rejection of treaties abolishing landmines and prohibiting the trafficking in small arms.
The goals of Mid-East peace and worldwide disarmament would both benefit from a shift toward more multilateralism. We must work with friends and neighbors to address all the problems of this tormented world—settling conflicts, heading off human and ecological disasters, early detection of epidemics, spreading peaceful scientific and technological advances, and making available proven solutions to all areas of the world.
An energized and serious media is indispensable. Our media traffic in the trivial, devoting thousands of prime-time hours to the trials and tribulations of Madonna, Michael Jackson, O. J. Simpson, Tanya Harding, and the like. But how many Americans have heard of the annual Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program? This report makes a great case for global optimism, demonstrating the availability of inexpensive life-saving measures. For far less than we spend on gambling, or cosmetics, and cigarettes, the world could have health, clean drinking water, and schooling. We are sorely in need of what William James called the “moral equivalent of war.” We should declare war on worldwide misery and deprivation, and contribute to raising the quality of life for billions of people worldwide.
In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the innovative thinker and architect Buckminster Fuller used to astonish audiences with a detailed explanation of how world poverty could be ended with an annual expenditure equivalent to one month’s spending on weapons. Billions of devastated lives later, Fuller’s plan remains unfulfilled.
The late James Grant, one of America’s unsung heroes and the head of UNICEF, helped save millions of young lives by negotiating entry into countries where deadly diseases could be easily prevented. My Princeton class of 1955 formed a global tuberculosis project to call attention to the relative ease with which this destroyer of two million lives a year could be combated.
Slowly but surely, the World Health Organization, prodded by various private and public foundations, has been highlighting the need for a multinational assault on global infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, AIDS, and malaria. At long last, Western Economists recognize what rural villages have known forever—disease undermines economic development. Fighting disease is justified on economic as well as human grounds.
Democracy is also good for economic development, but only if done properly. Today, spreading democracy has become a mantra for plutocratic propaganda and a justification for unwise actions like the invasion of Iraq. If the Bush administration wants to spread democracy, it doesn’t have to do so with tanks and missiles. We can nurture democratic growth in the Third World by assisting institutions already in place. In some cases, we have done the reverse. For example, over the decades, Washington has reduced the very modest contributions to the American University of Cairo and the American University of Beirut, even though these universities are rare success stories in a troubled region.
Power without accountability is a bad formula, and a commonplace one in the conduct of foreign policy. Our government spends billions for blunders, and no one is forced to resign. Our government violates our own laws and international laws, and reporters never ask, “What is the legal authority for this operation?” Our government props up brutal regimes and turns millions of people against us, and justifies such actions with a slogan—fighting communism, or a war on terrorism, or a war on drugs.
The foreign policy and intelligence agencies operate in secrecy and rarely have to explain themselves, even to each other. (The 9/11 Commission provides a welcome exception, but received a chilly reception from the Bush administration.) Federal Judge Damon Keith wrote, “democracy dies behind closed doors.” The U.S. Constitution requires publication of the government budget, but when an American citizen challenged the secrecy of the CIA budget in federal court, the case was dismissed. The judge said that this taxpayer had no legal standing to bring the action. Then who does have standing—the attorney general? Don’t hold your breath waiting for the attorney general to sue his own president.
There’s an impressive catalog of actions taken by our government and shrouded in secrecy: illegal spending, government overthrows, corporate tax havens, sovereignty-shredding trade agreements, circumventing our courts and agencies, taking nuclear waste from other countries, and allowing advanced weaponry and data to be sold by companies to oppressive regimes. Often such actions remain unknown and unchallenged. (A few years ago, the General Accounting Office explained that the sprawling Pentagon budget is unauditable. A one-day news story, long forgotten.)
In 2000, Chalmers Johnson, a professor and former naval officer, wrote a book called Blowback and defined the word, invented for internal use by the CIA, as follows: “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.” Johnson explains that the actions of terrorists, drug lords, rogue states, and arms merchants “often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.” Johnson’s book is devoted to instances of blowback and their cumulative impact. These boomerangs, he writes, “hollowed out our domestic manufacturing and bred a military establishment that is today close to being beyond civilian control.”
Our government acts in our name. When it resorts to violence or bribery abroad, or supports crude force on ordinary people to benefit repressive regimes and global corporations, the American people should know about it. When billions of our taxpayer dollars go to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and workers worldwide get their wages and services cut and taxes raised because of “structural adjustments” imposed by the IMF, Americans are entitled to be in the loop.
In his book Fortress America, William Grieder asks a fundamental question: “Are the armed forces deployed in behalf of U.S.-based multinationals or U.S. citizens?” Grieder believes that our national defense policy does not serve the interests of our citizenry, but there is no debate on this subject. He claims the American people are “open to more dramatic changes in national defense than a status quo Washington imagines. They await a real debate.”
We wait and we wait. But citizens have an obligation to at least try and learn what our government is doing abroad, especially since our government acts in our name. Apart from ethnic groups interested in the “old country,” Americans pay far too little attention to foreign policy. This is regrettable. Americans have too much goodness and too much talent not to play a more fundamental role than that of passive spectator. America’s foreign policy might not consist of a succession of follies if it were conducted and monitored more democratically.